Rally 996

[vlocci]

Pardon the heretical post about a 996! My SCRS is mothballed in anticipation of winter.

Interested in getting back into rallying here in the Northeast, so I did a quick rally build out of an '99 996 C2. Cable throttle, minimal electronic intervention, and a rally handbrake! What else do you need for some cheap fun.

Unlike the "for show" kits that give a few inches of lift and no revised suspension geometry I wanted to get a suspension that actually performed and was tuneable. Presently running an absurdly expensive set of Penske coilovers (I have a set of Fox Shocks on order to A/B compare against), along with modified LCA's, modified everything else, etc. Initial suspension testing is looking pretty promising with very controllable oversteer and lots of authority in compression and rebound. I'm taking the car to the chassis dyno next week to start working on valving.

Engine out refresh (3.4->3.8), front, center and rear skid plates, a custom roofrack and a some lights and we are off to the races! Running my first event in years next weekend through the forest, which will be a good mix of gravel and dirt. Given it is almost November, 50/50 odds we see some mud as well. Due for some wheels and tires as these were a quick and readily available set to get things started.

Thoughts? I'm having too much fun for the pricepoint.

[vlocci]

[Macroni]

Very Cool..... Budget Dakar.

[stownsen914]

Nice work!

[nospiners]

Love it , cheap fun is better fun !!

[vlocci]

Spent Sunday racing through the woods on some dirt and gravel roads in western MA. Fun stuff! Motor break in is complete and running beautifully.

Some suspension tuning is in the cards. Car behaves great in all conditions except under heavy braking turn in on very rough surfaces. Easily fixable in shock tuning and thankfully the shocks I'm running are readily disassembled and easy to customize valving.

I've got good accelerometer data on when this happens (along with a terabyte of driving data!!) so on Wed the car gets loaded onto the 7 post chassis dyno in my shop and we can shake things all sorts of ways to dial it in without burning a single drop of gas on the track. Magic, if not overkill!

Maybe some wheels and tires and after that I'm putting the wrenches down and enjoying until the next stupid idea pops into my head.

[faverymi]

What sway bars are you running?

Or no swaybars......

[vlocci]

Built some bladed sway bars front and rear using a splined torsion tube. This is for testing purposes as it makes adjustments super easy. Once dialed in and we know the rates I'll likely have one of our suppliers bend up and front and rear "traditional" style bar. The bladed setup is running spherical bearing joints which don't play nicely in the dirty on a daily driver.

[faverymi]

Good stuff.

Please post some videos of this car in action!!!

[Cory M]

Let's see the custom suspension bits

[vlocci]

suspension is dialed in! Machined up some wheels to fit. Daily driving this here in the northeast. Bring on the snow!!

[Ryan_Cunningham]

I think that's super cool. I've got a really remote property in Northern California that a build like that would be perfect for. No way in hell I can get either of my cars up the 2 mile dirt road cut into the side of the mountain.

I've thrown around the idea of buying a salvage 996 Turbo and doing something similar but I have far too many projects going on to be serious about it. Here's a AI rendering that I was playing with.



Rough idea on how much the suspension was?

[vlocci]

Where were you in 2003 when Porsche was designing the Cayenne?

Suspension was "expensive" but this is a 1 of 1 build and I'm using top tier stuff and have a ton of hours into machining parts. I've built this to tolerate some light airtime! If I knew what I now know I think you can do a very good suspension package for <10K that would actually perform as a "rally" setup and not a mall cruiser.

Fox offered to build me a set of coilovers for the application which I may take them up on someday. Based on their Elite 2.0 units, which are actually pretty decent, they swear that they would come in at $3500 for all 4 corners. Toss in some LCA's, bushings, wheels and tires and I think you could do it for sub 10K all in.

I'm not interested in selling bits and bobs, but would be happy to guide someone to the right components now that I've done the work.

[vlocci]

Hillclimb machine!